Wired – Embedded Posts: This Is Facebook’s Real Public Offering

by techmarketllc on July 31, 2013

By Mat Honan

July 31, 2013

Facebook is making a shift to the public sphere, precisely because it’s a public company. Everything it’s been doing in recent months–even years–has been aimed at making Facebook content more accessible outside of just your circle of friends. Graph Search, hashtags, the ability to follow users without friending, are all moves at making the stuff posted on Facebook more findable. When things are more findable, more people can see them. When more people can see them, well, you can sell more ads.

Facebook announced today that it’s rolling out embedded posts. That means you’ll be able to click on a link in whatever you publish, get a code, and embed that content elsewhere on the web–just like you can already do with YouTube, Twitter, Vine and Instagram. For now, only CNN, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, PEOPLE and Mashable will be able to embed public posts. But in the coming weeks, and perhaps as soon as the next several days, expect this to go wide. At some point, it’s going to mean Facebook infiltrating Tumblr, WordPress, your local news station, basically anything on the web. It’s the inevitable end of the walled garden, as Zuckerberg drags the company–and its users–ever more into the public sphere. In short, Zuck is making Facebook a part of the web.